Give the public more of a say in prison sentences, not criminal investigations

When some friends were burgled a couple of years ago, it took police over a week to get back to their phone call and make an appearance at their flat. When they did, one remembers, the first question they asked was: “Would you consider yourself a victim of crime?”

This slightly surprised him. Quite clearly, from an empirical, factual point of view, he was a victim of crime. The second question was “how would you describe your ethnic appearance?" He recalls the policeman had a look on his face that perfectly conveyed his feeling – can you believe we have to do this rubbish? That out of the way, they then set about trying to solve the crime.

It’s a common frustration. My experiences are generally quite similar – when the front wall outside my home was knocked down by a mentally ill man, I had to chase the police with half a dozen phone calls to find out what they were doing about it; even though witnesses had seen a man approaching the property while muttering to himself, and witnesses saw him walk off afterwards, they didn’t feel this was strong enough. In the end they said that as he was on day release from a mental hospital at the time, it was the health authorities’ responsibility, not theirs. After a couple of calls to the health authorities I gave up; who knows, he’s probably out there somewhere right now.

My other recent dealings have involved bike theft – as for that, forget it. Think of the scene in The Big Lebowski: “Leads, yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts!”

Still, I did get a letter a few days later offering counselling.

So many of us will no doubt welcome the suggestion by Bernard Hogan-Howe, the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, that victims should have a say in whether cases are screened out, that is, given up on. Last year the Metropolitan Police screened out over 20,000 violent crimes, including 61 attacks with offensive weapons, 236 sexual offences and 5,420 robberies. That’s a lot of crime that people are getting away with.

This is not to have a go at the police; they have finite resources and many crimes are simply dead ends. But it’s important that the public feel they have some say in the matter.

And the real problem is imprisonment. Most people want a police force that prevents crime, not records it, and the most effective way to do that is to aggressively take on the less serious offenders – the vandals, street dealers, burglars and other scumbags. It was this policy that turned New York from a place that looked like the set of a dystopian sci-fi film into one that looks like the set of a Richard Curtis rom-com.

But the police cannot do that unless the courts start handing out harsher sentencing, for the simple reason that a huge swathe of this medium-level crime is committed by a very small number of people. The police were almost certain that my friends' flat was burgled by the same heroin addict who had burgled 20 other properties in the area; I never found out the case history, but plenty of burglars are given suspended sentences, which, considering the number of burglaries they typically commit before being caught, is baffling.

And so for crime to drop, the prison population will have to be hugely increased; this will cost money, but since a persistent offender can cost seven or eight times outside what he costs inside, it will also save a fair bit. It will upset the crowd who say that we already imprison a large number of people per capita, so we have to remind them that we actually imprison few per crimes committed, compared to other European countries. Most importantly, it will change the ratio of police and thieves out there in favour of the good guys; after all, the best experience we can have with the police is to not have an experience in the first place.